Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of gender on fluent Turkish native speakers' speech disfluency production rates. Totally 84 participants from four different age groups (4-8, 18-27, 33-50 and over 50) took part in the study. Gender distribution was equal in each group. In a corpus of face to face interviews, the prepared and impromptu speech samples of at least 300 words from each participant were analyzed. As a result, in the prepared speech situation 18-23-year-old males produced more prolongations than females, and 33-50-year-old males produced more prolongations, false starts and slips of the tongue (SOT) than females in the same age group. In impromptu speech situation, 18-23-year-old males produced more hesitations, prolongations, false starts and slips of the tongue than females, and 33-50-year-old males produced more prolongations and false starts than females in the same age group. Further analyses pointed out various findings related to the position of disfluencies in an utterance and the linguistic units involved in disfluency production.

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References

Acton, E.K. (2011). On gender differences in the distribution of um and uh. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 17(2), 1–9.

Erişen, İ.O. (2010). Language production in a typological perspective: a corpus study of Turkish slips of the tongue. (Unpublished Master’s Thesis). Ankara: The Graduate School of Informatics of the Middle East Technical University.